Too Late
by Fifth Horseman
Summary: One hour one shot. Rei's thoughts before 3I.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own Neon Genesis Evangelion or anything associated with it. Gainax created this world, I just play in it.

Another one hour, one shot, this time from the perspective of Rei Ayanami.

As always, your reviews are appreciated and I look forward to them.

**Too Late**

The time is almost here. The time that is the culmination of my entire existence. The time that I was created for. Very soon, I will disappear into the bowels of Terminal Dogma and stand naked before the white giant that is crucified there. I will feel the pull on my entire being, beckoning me to join it. The Commander will push the embryonic entity of Adam that is grafted to his hand into my body and begin the process he has been working towards for so long.

And for the first time in my life, I will defy my maker.

Far too late, I have come to realize that I was simply a tool to him. A tool that he has never hesitated to use in whatever way necessary to advance his scenario. I was the tool that drove Naoko Akagi mad enough to strangle a mere child to death and then take her own life. I was the tool that evoked the sympathy of the Commander's son and forced him into the pilot's seat of Unit 01. I was the tool that made the dummy plug possible.

I am the tool that will end the world.

I had respected the Commander. He had been my entire world. He was the reason I was alive. He supplied me with a purpose, a reason to live the life that he had given to me. I had faith in him, believed in the things he told me, and I blindly followed his words because that was all that I knew. He said that it was all that I needed. Anything else would distract me from my purpose and was to be ignored.

I was alive, but I did not _live._

It has taken my interactions with Shinji to make me see that I was being used. His attempts at friendship slowly started me upon a path that made me begin to question everything I had known up until that point. The Commander had said that things like friendships and personal relationships were useless and unimportant and would only distract me from my purpose. It confused me. If such things were useless, unimportant, and had no value, then why had I slowly begun to feel a sense of comfort and warmth when Shinji looked at me or spoke to me? Why did I blush and feel my heart flutter when he touched me, even by accident? Why did it all feel so right to me?

No one else had ever wanted to be near me. I was the freak, the ice princess, the quiet, antisocial girl who ignored everyone and shunned the very few attempts that had been made to gain my friendship. I was isolated and left alone and I had become comfortable with it.

Until Shinji came into my life.

He did not know me, but he showed concern and sympathy over my condition and despite his fear he piloted the Eva so I would not have to. He rescued me from my damaged Eva after the Fifth Angel, shedding tears of concern for me and making me smile. Despite my quiet and seemingly cold demeanour, he still tried to be my friend. He did not see me as a freak, or a doll, or something to be avoided like a contagious disease.

When his Eva absorbed him after the fight with the Fourteenth Angel, I was surprised to find that I was worried about him. It seemed that he now occupied a space in my life that I did not wish to see empty. I had never worried about anyone before. I did not understand what my feelings towards him were or what they meant, and I discovered that I did not care if those feelings were contrary to what the Commander had told me.

While Shinji had brought some warmth into my life, the Commander had turned increasingly cold towards me. By this time I had finally begun to doubt him, questioning the validity of the things that he had told me. It caused me to spend a great deal of time looking within myself and analyzing my life. I began to look at things differently and I began to see the Commander for the obsessed, twisted man he was. I also realized that I had no way out. The fact that I was replaceable meant that no matter what I did, he would still have his way.

I sacrificed myself willingly against the Sixteenth Angel in order to save Shinji's life. It was my first truly selfless act. When I finally regained my memories after being activated as the third form of myself, I was very angry to discover that my death had been preordained and part of the Commander's scenario. I had never felt like this before. It was the last indignity that finally turned me against him. That, and the fact that Shinji was now afraid of me and had begun to avoid me just like so many people had during my life.

It made my heart hurt, it made me feel sick. The Commander's manipulations had turned Dr. Akagi into a woman filled with rage and jealousy and on the brink of insanity. To strike a spiteful blow at him, she revealed my clones to Shinji and Major Katsuragi, and then destroyed them. It was an act that robbed me of my only friend. The only person who truly cared about me.

With a sense of satisfaction I pick up the Commander's cracked and heat warped glasses from my night table and began to bend and twist them. They had been my talisman, my proof that the Commander cared about me. That I was special to him. I now know what a foolish notion that had been. When he rescued me from the entry plug that day, it was not because he was concerned for Rei Ayanami the person, he was concerned because the activation test accident was not in his scenario and my death would alter his timetable. Despite the fact that I could be replaced, it would have been inconvenient for him.

The cracked lenses snap and the frames break and I drop the glasses to the already littered and filthy floor of my slum apartment. It suddenly hits me that my living conditions were an obvious sign of what I really meant to the Commander, but I had never noticed until now.

But it is too late for such realisations now. It is time for me to go and fulfil my purpose. It is time to go and commit my one act of defiance. I will take control of Instrumentality away from the father and give it to the son. To my one friend who awakened me from the Commander's spell. It is all that I can do now, things have progressed too far and it is too late to take any other action. I regret that I will probably be giving Shinji nothing but more pain, but if anyone deserves to hold the fate of mankind in their hands, it is him. He has done more than any of us to save humanity from the Angels.

When our souls meet again I will do all that I can to help ease his mind and his pain, to help him find a road through life other than the one his father set out for him. I will give up everything that I am to give him a chance to live and to find happiness.

For what he has given me, it is the least that I can do.

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Thanks for reading. I hope it was okay. 

And please, check out my other stories. You know how to find them.


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